"Fool: If thou wert my fool, nuncle, I'd have thee beaten for being old before thy time.
Lear: How's that?
Fool: Thou shouldst not have been old till thou hadst
been wise".
...
Lear: How's that?
Fool: Thou shouldst not have been old till thou hadst
been wise".
...
This bitter exchange only makes sense if there is an expectation that old age be accompanied by wisdom. Indeed the weight and puzzle of that expectation is one of the great themes of the play.
Shakespeare is of course right that there is no simple equivalence between old age and wisdom. However, portraying this is not the same as simply abolishing the expectation. On the contrary, Lear's foolishness is tragic because the expectation makes some form of sense.
Yet it seems to me that, in the modern West, we have come as close as is humanly possible to such an abolition. We barely believe in wisdom at all, still less the wisdom of white hairs.
We see old age largely as either merely a prolongation of being younger ("young at heart") or as a curse: the time of illness and irrelevance.
Old age is of course the time of illness, and the time of death. So surely a considerable part of why we struggle to honour it is that we struggle to accept illness and death.
We also struggle to see much good in the detachment from sensuality which comes with the cooling of the passions. "Wanting less" is not seen as a form of wisdom in a world driven by wants.
The expectation of wisdom can of course be a burden to both old and young. Lear groans under it, and his kingdom groans under Lear.
But absent this expectation, what comfort can we give our elders, and what can we ourselves look forward to in compensation for the ineluctable losses of our later years?
The old are not strong or quick-witted or attractive or engines of profit. If we shape no role for them as elders, worthy of some form of reverence, what are they but, at best, objects of pity, and at worst, failures surplus to requirements?
No wonder we were so keen to lock them down. No wonder we are now legalizing eliminating them altogether.
Goneril and Regan would approve.
Goneril and Regan would approve.
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